LIFE=JOY.

October 12, 2008

A beautiful future?

Thanks to my “e-friend” Tom Atlee and in relation to the looming financial crisis (?) which I have begun to think about in earnest these last few days, I received the following brilliant article by Charles Eisenstein, author of the Ascent of humanity.

Essentially it asks: “Given what’s coming, what is the most beautiful thing I can do?“

Here’s a key paragraph:

“…every time there is an economic recession…People can no longer pay for various goods and services, and so have torely on friends and neighbors instead. Where there is no money tofacilitate transactions, gift economies reemerge and new kinds of money arecreated. Ordinarily, though, people and institutions fight tooth and nailto prevent that from happening. The habitual first response to economiccrisis is to make and keep more money — to accelerate the conversion ofanything you can into money. On a systemic level, the debt surge isgenerating enormous pressure to extend the commodification of thecommonwealth. We can see this happening with the calls to drill for oil inAlaska, commence deep-sea drilling, and so on. The time is here, though,for the reverse process to begin in earnest — to remove things from therealm of goods and services, and return them to the realm of gifts, reciprocity, self-sufficiency, and community sharing. Note well: this isgoing to happen anyway in the wake of a currency collapse, as people losetheir jobs or become too poor to buy things. People will help each otherand real communities will reemerge.”

This cast my memory back to the way helped each other at home in Ireland when I was growing up – exchanging cabbage for a haircut and helping cut peat turf for a couple of dozen eggs. Those transactions fill my heart to this day (there were levels to the exchange that transcended the common-place) and were, even then, way beyond Web 4.0. (NOTE: My maturation sequence of the control nexus of the web: 1=system, 2=relationship, 3=meaning, 4=soul).

This all in turn reminded me of the actual secondary currency of countries such as Bali where there is an actual fiscal currency but also a bartered exchange system for services regardless of actual value. In fact, my friend, RichVazquez, has a highly innovative time exchange system already up and running in Austin, Texas.

“Time Banking” as it is commonly called, is a program that has been growing for over 25 years. It is inspired by concepts developed by Edgar Cahn, an attorney, economist, and pioneer of social change, who had a vision of how communities could empower themselves by looking within to meet one another’s needs.

Who knows what the future holds!? I hope though we will still experience something beautiful.